Tip of the Iceberg
by SomeGuyOrOther
Summary: Sometimes, the reward for impressing a superior isn't that rewarding: especially when the one impressed is General W.R. Monger.
1. Chapter 1

Two men walked along an endless gangplank running along the side of a dimly-lit metal cliff.

"You know," the older man said, "that was pretty impressive. Not disconnecting the wires right after it was installed - any idiot with a basic sense of self-preservation could have done _that_ - but that little speech you made. About having been in on the President's 'marvelous practical joke' from the beginning and how you'd email him the 'reaction shots'. And you managed it with a straight face, too."

"Thanks, I guess" replied the younger man, scratching behind his ear nervously.

"Boy, you have not only impressive technical credentials, but also the ability to think on your feet. And that is absolutely _vital_ for the job."

_The immense lizard battered its head into the unyielding steel again. Slime dribbled from its jaws and ate small new pits in the corroded floor. It thumped its swollen tail and let out a hissing roar like hot lava falling into the sea._

"Ah, sir…"

"Yes? Speak up, man!"

"I'm a bit confused. What exactly _is_ my job? We were informed that since the monsters had received their parole for the saving-the-world-thing, this place would be shut down…" he trailed off, frowning.

The old soldier gave a snort of amusement.

"Shut it down??? Shut. It. Down??? I guess you aren't quite as quick on the draw as I thought - bloody hell, now that I'm being kicked upstairs, I'm seeing about training a few good men to take over! You're not going to be shutting it down - you're going to be helping to run it!"

_The room was absolutely dark, and stank of rotting meat. Things moved in it, shambling along the walls, their grey, puffy and occasionally mutilated fingers perpetually groping for an opening that did not exist. The only sound was a low moaning, occasionally punctuated by a long, drawn-out howl of "Braaaains!"_

The young technician looked thoughtful, and paused to wipe his glasses on his shirt. "So there still are some more…err…"

"I think the word you're gropin' for is - _Monsters._" Snorted the old soldier. "See, we didn't parole _the_ monsters, we paroled _some_ monsters - there's a difference."

_The room glowed a pale, sickly blue. The steel walls, floor, ceiling, 1950s modernist furniture: it all glowed. The man with the horribly scarred head glowed more brightly, and his eyes were portholes into a blue hell. Wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and pants held up by suspenders, he plaid endless games of solitaire. He never spoke._

_The cards were replaced monthly as they slowly turned brittle and crumbled to dust._

He grinned ferociously. "Awfully useful story, though. We've let the monsters go, they're actually heroes, and people don't have to worry about it any more. Liberals get to have their moment of self-righteousness about right-wing paranoia and secrecy, the conservatives will feel safer to know the US military can get away with crap like this. We're faking up some "decommissioning" footage from the actual shutdown of Hanger 12..."

"Don't you mean Hanger 13?"

"No. You're thinking of Hanger 7."

"Hanger…?"

"Sonny, I must warn you, under secret presidential order 347, I _will_ be forced to shoot you if you continue this line of questioning."

_They. They swarmed through the dark earthen tunnels inside of the colossal containment structure. They were stronger now, cleverer, tougher. The poisons the meat-things had used in the past to control their numbers no longer worked, and they had been forced to use napalm to decimate them when they expanded to fill the tunnels and their weird, clattering cries echoed through the complex. It was unimportant. As long as one queen survived, they would regain their numbers. And each generation would be stronger than the previous._

"So.." the younger man paused, a worried frown on his face. "How many of these…other monsters… are we talking about?"

"Well, look around you, boy. You think this whole super colossal multi-billion dollar mega complex, with guards ridin' flying machines and doors bigger than the Vehicle Assembly Building and armies of guards, and **so on** was built just to hold two mad scientists - one of which only came up with one diabolical invention his whole life - an idiot blob, and an evolutionary impossibility who likes scaring co-eds?"

_This room was dark, too. The tall, gaunt man and a couple of angular women sat on the comfy couch and watched reruns of "Angel" and rolled their eyes and laughed. Others moved silently around the murky complex of rooms. The tall man took a sip of the warm, red fluid in his plastic cup and looked away from the TV for a moment at the sensors dotting the ceiling. He frowned. Watching, always watching. With a shrug, he took a large gulp of not-wine and turned back to the TV. After all, in the end, if escape proved impossible, he would outlive their civilization and feed on the next._

"There's Insectosaurus..," began the technician.

"Hell, all we needed for him was a big enough hole and a steady supply of leafy greens. He's not exactly the sort to plan a brilliant, gets-made-into-a-movie getaway. And we hardly knew we'd be getting a big gal like Ginormica half a century in advance."

_Nothing moved in this room. The curious, cloth-wrapped shapes lay on the metal floor, looking as dead as 3000-year-plus old corpses usually do. After all, the nearest tana leaves and evil Egyptian cultists were in San Francisco. And none of the carefully vetted staff was even _related _to an archeologist._

The grey-haired general began to walk faster, waving his arms as he talked. "You know _why _we picked those five to fight the robot? It's because they were about the only ones we could more-or-less trust to not immediately go on a rampage or just run off and start eating people - or worse!"

_The man with the bushy eyebrows and hairy palms was reasonably content. He had books, music, the internet, a great porn collection, a fully stocked kitchen, and it was another three weeks before certain celestial events forced him to go into the "other" room_. _Best of all, he would never hurt anyone again._

"I mean, why did we give them a common room and allow them to talk and even let Dr. Cockroach play with his toys a little on occasion?"

"Trying to get something you could use for military purposes?"

"Well, that too, but mostly because they weren't bad folks, for unnatural abominations. Having something else to talk to was good for them, and they weren't going to eat each other."

_The Unimaginable lay on the floor of its cell and emitted colors which did not exist in any sane spectrum. The walls had twisted and partly melted in ways that made them look vaguely organic, and people had begun to see screaming faces etched into the viewing ports again. It was time to move it to a fresh cell, and bury the old one under a few thousand tons of concrete marked with certain star-shaped patterns. Hopefully no more than one or two of the staff would go mad this time._

"Bobs an idiot, but he's a good-natured idiot. Not a mean bone in his body - so to speak. For all that her very existence is an affront to the laws of biology and physics - not to mention the boom she's caused in a rather disturbing form of pornography - Ginormica is a pretty nice lady. The Missing Link never actually hurt anyone - he just likes making pretty girls scream.."

_The small, concrete-walled room was almost filled by the vast crystalline tank. Pipes and wires attached to monitors ran in and out of it and through the walls. In the murky fluid, a gelatinous mass, deeply convoluted and divided into two hemispheres, floated. Occasionally the pipes would ever so slightly tremble as some unseen force traveled along them, racing along endless uninhabited dark tunnels, until it petered out still some miles short of the main complex._

_It grew, slowly. And every year the almost unnoticeable vibration reached further towards where people with legs and hands lived and worked._

"…although trying to explain him has driven several naturalists to switch careers to tax accountancy. Insectosaurus is just a big puppy - heck, a giant puppy would be worse- he's a vegetarian - and now that he flies, we don't have to worry about him accidentally trampling things all the time. Now, Dr. Cockroach, I still do worry about him. He may _mean_ well…"

_The Ape Of Unusual Size missed his island. And he was really getting sick of bananas. On the other hand, he'd caught a whiff of girl, a whiff so potent he found himself wondering whether there might actually exist a woman large enough that he wouldn't end up accidentally breaking her. (The Ape Of Unusual Size always had bad luck with his girlfriends). _

"…but he's a mad scientist, after all. Probably end up blowing up North America trying to find a way to cure flat feet."

The General sighed, taking on momentarily a long-suffering look before briskly striding forward. The walkway passed through a long corridor and opened onto a small space overlooking blackness.

_The giant stood nearly eight feet tall in the vast, art-filled room. He stood in front of his latest canvas, a work entitled 'Freedom'. A massive yellow paw of a hand scratched a face the yellow, papery skin of which had an odd translucence, allowing more than a hint of the veins and tendons beneath to show through. Grey, watery eyes blinked and black, dog-like lips curled back from teeth like tombstones. Still not quite right. A little more red, for one thing. Carefully dabbing at the pile of mutilated corpses under his painted feet, he wondered to himself why the General so rarely came around any more. After all, he thought as he added a touch of purple to the General's neck-stump, they had had such…interesting…conversations. [1]_

The technician gingery looked over the rails. They seemed to overlook a limitless void, the steel-plated wall dropping down into darkness, invisible more than a hundred feet or so down. There was a smell like the sea.

Grabbing a heavy iron rod attached to the railing by a chain, the General hollered, "Take a look at this!", and began furiously whaling away on the railings, with loud shouts of "Come and get it!" and "Chow time!"

(If the universe ran by anime rules, the technician would now have a giant sweat drop suspended from the back of his head.)

There was a noise like Godzilla doing a belly flop into the world's largest swimming pool, and vast, wet, writhing _shapes_ arose from the dark.

"Aaaah!!!" The technician pithily responded, staggering back into the corner railing. The General grabbed his arm in an iron grip.

"Careful, son. That's one hell of a first step, and _I'm_ the one with the jetpack."

Gingerly glancing back towards the pit, the technician saw, to his relief, that the redwood-sized…_tentacles_ stopped about thirty feet short of the railing. They blindly groped the air, manhole-cover sized suckers pulsing along their length. The General, still holding firmly onto his arm, gestured expansively.

"That, my boy, is Megapus. I think you will find him one of my, and now your, hmm…"- a humorless grin briefly twisted General W. R. Monger's lips - "less _troublesome_ guests."

_The giant crabs were screaming in human voices again. The section chief passed out earplugs._

[1] Yes, I know, I know. But the Universal Pictures version would almost certainly be one of the good guys.


	2. Monster Notes

AUTHOR NOTE:

Someone expressed curiosity over what the monsters I added are. Since they have their messaging function turned off, I thought I'd add a quick list to indicate where they come from.

1.) _The Giant Gila Monster_ (1959)

2.) Generic Zombies (yes, post-50's critters, but sometimes one is just compelled by the zeitgeist)

3.) Some _Creature with the Atom Brain_ (1955), a bit Tor Johnson _The Beast of Yucca Flats_ (1961), a bit general "radioactive zombie."

4.) _Them!_ (1954)

5.) Vampires (too many movies to list)

6.) Mummies (quite a few films)

7.) Standard Werewolf (as above)

8.) Lovecraftian horror, a bit _Die, Monster, Die _(1965) and some _The Magnetic Monster_ (1953)

9.) Some _Donovan's Brain _(1953), some _Brain from the Planet Arous_ (1957), some classic "Outer Limits" (_The Brain of Colonel Barham _(1963))

10.) I think everyone gets this one

11.) The original long-winded psycho created by Mary Shelley and animated by the bungling Dr. Frankenstein…

12.) _It Came from Beneath The Sea_ (1955)


End file.
